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Holocaust Denial

Analogue Boy said:
To a man with only a hammer, every problem is a nail.
And Goldberg has found herself in a situation defined, outlined yet confined by her narrow view of race which seems quite exclusive. Or should that be inclusive.
The Nazis described themselves as The Master Race and viewed just about every other race as inferior. To even consider the persecution and the horrific atrocities the Nazis carried out as anything other than murderous race hate committed on an industrial scale of unbelievable cruelty shows an incredible lack of understanding and empathy. For that reason alone, she should be dropped from the show and the station should make a full and sincere apology.
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I do not understand why so many here are criticizing Goldberg about what is to me a minor point (“race,” “White people”), and ignoring her statement about the more encompassing problem: man’s inhumanity to man.

Quoting MO, who quoted Ms Goldberg: “Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people. You’re missing the point … let’s talk about it for what it really is. It’s about how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, Jews … everybody eats each other.”

If anyone who has objected to Goldberg’s terminology can explain to me why this terminology is more important to him or her than Goldberg’s observation about humanity, I would be very grateful.

Since the Nazis (and their collaborators) intentionally killed about 11M, 6M of which were Jewish, this leave about 5M of “others” including ethnic Germans who were gay, criminals, disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so on. So this cannot accurately be termed a “race war” if 45% - almost half - of the intended victims were non-Jewish. Using the Nazi’s definition of race, subservient races, and master race is problematic, since it evolved over time and became more and more encompassing. (I wonder what the Nazis would have done with their Japanese coalition partner if the Nazis had succeeded in killing off all non-German Europe. Would they then have to exterminate the non-German Japanese – their partners?)

The village my Polish grandmother and grandfather came from disappeared during WWII. It was near the modern border between SW Poland and Czechoslovakia (Auschwitz/Oswiecim), so one may draw one’s own conclusions. As a child, I met many Polish and Serbian immigrants to the US who wore to their death their concentration camp number tattoos on their forearms. As I recall, all these people hated the Jews with a passion. Shall we feel sorry for them as victims, or hate them as racists? Reality is so messy.

I respectfully disagree that I have “an incredible lack of understanding and empathy” merely because I view the holocaust and physical differences between people differently. Physical difference exist; this is reality. What we choose to do with these differences is a social choice.
 
Whoopi Goldberg was talking rubbish about race not being part of The Holocaust.

It matters to me because she was historically not correct, and that becomes the thin end of the wedge.
It matters because it trivialises The Holocaust, frames it as a "white issue" rather than a human issue.

Racial theory was a huge part of Nazism, anyone who has studied the subject knows that.

Goldberg clearly has not.

The Nazi Extermination Camps killed Jews from North Africa; hundreds of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian Jews died at Sobibor.
Brown skinned Jews.

Mussolini applied anti-Jewish "racial laws" against the Jews of Ethiopia from 1935 onwards after he invaded.
White Europeans discriminating against Black African Jews.
He concocted a scheme to export all European Jews to Northern Ethiopia and set up a Jewish state there, which came to nothing.

Many hundreds of Jews in Iraq were massacred in the Nazi instigated Farhud Pogrom of 1941 - Brown skinned Arabs killing Brown skinned Jews.

Nazis sterilised non-Jewish African American and African Germans living in the Rhineland and in the concentration camps too.
See the insult "Rheinlandbastarde"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_Bastard

"In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described children resulting from any kind of relationship to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe."[8] He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."

And race played a part that the Japanese allies of the Nazis, let the European Jews who had fled to Shanghai live there during the war, because the Jews convinced the Japanese that the reason the Nazis persecuted them was that they were an Asiatic people.

Goldberg claims she is Jewish, though without a shred of evidence. Goldberg is her stage name.


Strictly speaking we Jews are not a race, even though we will generally be facially distinct from the majority of the population of any diaspora country we live in.
We are a spiritual nation, composed of different ethnicities.
 
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Victory said:
Whoopi Goldberg was talking rubbish about race not being part of The Holocaust.

It matters to me because she was historically not correct, and that becomes the thin end of the wedge.
It matters because it trivialises The Holocaust, frames it as a "white issue" rather than a human issue.

Racial theory was a huge part of Nazism, anyone who has studied the subject knows that.

Goldberg clearly has not.

The Nazi Extermination Camps killed Jews from North Africa; hundreds of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian Jews died at Sobibor.
Brown skinned Jews.

Mussolini applied anti-Jewish "racial laws" against the Jews of Ethiopia from 1935 onwards after he invaded.
White Europeans discriminating against Black African Jews.
He concocted a scheme to export all European Jews to Northern Ethiopia and set up a Jewish state there, which came to nothing.

Many hundreds of Jews in Iraq were massacred in the Nazi instigated Farhud Pogrom of 1941 - brown skinned Arabs killing brown skinned Jews.

Nazis sterilised non-Jewish African American and African Germans living in the Rhineland and in the concentration camps too.
See the insult "Rheinlandbastarde"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_Bastard

"In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described children resulting from any kind of relationship to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe."[8] He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."

And race played a part that the Japanese allies of the Nazis, let the European Jews who had fled to Shanghai live there during the war, because the Jews convinced the Japanese that the reason the Nazis persecuted them was that they were an Asiatic people.

Goldberg claims she is Jewish, though without a shred of evidence. Goldberg is her stage name.


Strictly speaking we Jews are not a race, even though we will generally be facially distinct from the majority of the population of any diaspora country we live in.
We are a spiritual nation, composed of different ethnicities.
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Great Comment!! And let's not forget all the other victims of that Holocaust time, there were millions of Polish Catholics for example who perished as well, and many millions of others.
 
A friend's stillborn twin brother was not allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in East London on the basis that the mother wasn't Jewish, despite converting. The father was so my friend would no doubt have been Jewish enough for the Nazis.
 
I present the following for fuller context, not to forcefully try to change anyone's opinion.

Goldberg appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Monday night (available on YouTube) and explained her comments further. She said that to many Black people in America, the word "race" refers to something you can see immediately, like skin color. She was not denying the Holocaust's roots in ethnic hatred, but used an example of why she thought it was something different than simple race hatred: if she were standing on a street corner with a Jewish friend when a violent mob of Nazis walked down the street, she would have to run, but her friend might be passed by because she probably could not be as easily identified as Jewish by looks. The evil of Nazi hate was that they had to "do the work" to identify members of the groups they hated - not only Jews, but the others who were not as systematically slaughtered - and literally put labels like yellow stars on them.

Goldberg is around my age. When I was growing up, I was taught there were only three races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Jews would definitely belong to the first. Today I recognize the ridiculous simplicity of this model, and tend to agree with those who dismiss the whole concept of "race" as an artificial construct. What I heard in Goldberg's statement was a use of a word in an old-fashioned way that made people upset before they listened to what she actually had to say. Let's not forget the whole reason she said it was in defending the book Maus as something that should not be banned in schools.

That's my two cents, and you are welcome to disagree. Lest we descend into the type of argument that doesn't belong on this forum, I don't think I'll be commenting further.
 
Victory said:
Whoopi Goldberg was talking rubbish about race not being part of The Holocaust.

It matters to me because she was historically not correct, and that becomes the thin end of the wedge.
It matters because it trivialises The Holocaust, frames it as a "white issue" rather than a human issue.

Racial theory was a huge part of Nazism, anyone who has studied the subject knows that.

Goldberg clearly has not.

The Nazi Extermination Camps killed Jews from North Africa; hundreds of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian Jews died at Sobibor.
Brown skinned Jews.

Mussolini applied anti-Jewish "racial laws" against the Jews of Ethiopia from 1935 onwards after he invaded.
White Europeans discriminating against Black African Jews.
He concocted a scheme to export all European Jews to Northern Ethiopia and set up a Jewish state there, which came to nothing.

Many hundreds of Jews in Iraq were massacred in the Nazi instigated Farhud Pogrom of 1941 - brown skinned Arabs killing brown skinned Jews.

Nazis sterilised non-Jewish African American and African Germans living in the Rhineland and in the concentration camps too.
See the insult "Rheinlandbastarde"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_Bastard

"In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described children resulting from any kind of relationship to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe."[8] He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."

And race played a part that the Japanese allies of the Nazis, let the European Jews who had fled to Shanghai live there during the war, because the Jews convinced the Japanese that the reason the Nazis persecuted them was that they were an Asiatic people.

Goldberg claims she is Jewish, though without a shred of evidence. Goldberg is her stage name.


Strictly speaking we Jews are not a race, even though we will generally be facially distinct from the majority of the population of any diaspora country we live in.
We are a spiritual nation, composed of different ethnicities.
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Victory - thank you for the clear explanation of your view. It is coherent, reasoned, gives evidence, etc. I wish the forteana forums could clone you :) You and I had focussed on different aspects of her comments, and so reached very different conclusions.

I had read an interview with Goldberg 30 years ago or so. In it, she described her spiritual journey, and how she decided to become a Jew because the Jewish faith had the clearest and best thought-out approach to compassion. She changed her name to Goldberg at the time. I have no idea if she ever converted, joined a synagogue, or took instruction formally. Still, in the US, it is rare for a black person to publicly speak well of Jews. Enough so that her interview stuck in my memory.

I will follow @ChasFink and his wisdom, and so this will be my last comment here as well.
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
Great Comment!! And let's not forget all the other victims of that Holocaust time, there were millions of Polish Catholics for example who perished as well, and many millions of others.
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Romanys as well. I don't know what the preferred term is now. What in my youth would have been recognised as Gypsies as opposed to Travellers.
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
You might be right, my Mum always told me to 'Be Kind' to everyone, because you have no idea what their life is like, she was so correct!
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The way I've heard that advice is, be kind, you have no idea what sort of day the other person has had, and it's good advice.

I've never heard anyone give the advice "Be horrible, you can easily make this person's day worse", though I don't doubt there are people who think like that.
 
Ogdred Weary said:
A friend's stillborn twin brother was not allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in East London on the basis that the mother wasn't Jewish, despite converting. The father was so my friend would no doubt have been Jewish enough for the Nazis.
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Whilst acknowledging that the death of a child is a traumatic experience for anyone....

The decision on the cemetery depends on the validity of her conversion, and who she converted with.

If she converted outside a recognised Orthodox Jewish authority, without going through their thorough process over a number of years, then she would not be Halachically Jewish (Jewish by Jewish law) and so neither would her child.

From your brief comment, it sounds as if her conversion was through a Masorti, Reform or Liberal Rabbinical Authority, whereas the cemetery would have been under an Orthodox authority.
Some of the Liberal Rabbis recognise Jews as someone with a Jewish father, whereas Orthodox Rabbis recognise descendants of the mother only, or someone who has gone through a conversion certified by them.

If it is East London then it probably is one of the Orthodox cemeteries, as most of the non-Orthodox ones are around the M25 outside North and North West London, or the older ones are in North West London.

The "Jewish enough for Hitler" argument is a reason people who are not Jewish can qualify for Israeli passports if they had a Jewish grandparent.
 
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On the History Channel I remember seeing Eisenhower making sure the death camps of WW II where filmed so the world would know what happened.

No matter what religion, there are always different degrees, different sects, and different interpretations.
 
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I work with someone who denies the holocaust. I'm rather tired of him trying to present me with 'proof' of his point of view. I personally have better things to do than refute his ill sourced lies.
 
Eisenhower and Omar Bradley meticulously filmed the horrors of Ohrduf Death Camp seeing hundreds of killed people just a few minutes before the allied troops stormed the camp to free it.

People just have to watch the films.
 
Spudrick68 said:
I work with someone who denies the holocaust. I'm rather tired of him trying to present me with 'proof' of his point of view. I personally have better things to do than refute his ill sourced lies.
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I wonder what other types of nonsense he believes?
 
Ogdred Weary said:
A friend's stillborn twin brother was not allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in East London on the basis that the mother wasn't Jewish, despite converting. The father was so my friend would no doubt have been Jewish enough for the Nazis.
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My ex's mum was born Jewish and to quite an orthodox family. She married an Italian catholic (in the 1950s) and he was sort of made to convert, or her parents wouldn't have let her marry him. She was the first and only member of her family to marry someone who wasn't born Jewish. Caused big outrage, she said.

Years later, after her husband was dead, she converted to catholicism and was pretty serious about it. I know the parish priest visited her often and blessed my babies when I was expecting them!

But when she died, the family had her buried with Jewish rites, in the Jewish area of a London cemetery, no ifs not buts. I knew she's have hated that. In fact, I found it very upsetting - it just wasn't what she'd have wanted. Not that the dead are any the wiser and a great part of any death ritual is, I guess, to comfort the living but still - very disrespectful of what her wishes would have been and who she was for the last few decades of her life.
 
Spudrick68 said:
I work with someone who denies the holocaust. I'm rather tired of him trying to present me with 'proof' of his point of view. I personally have better things to do than refute his ill sourced lies.
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I wonder what these people think happened? My grandfather was one of those British soldiers who walked in to liberate Belsen, one morning. Was that a film set, then?
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
I wonder what these people think happened? My grandfather was one of those British soldiers who walked in to liberate Belsen, one morning. Was that a film set, then?
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Auschwitz-Birkenau is still there. You can visit - I have. And I've met relatives who still have the arm tattoos.
People leave flowers and notes on specific inmate photos among the many that line the hallways of the barracks at Auschwitz. That's a pretty ridiculous level of detail for a hoax.

And if you need proof that the Nazis especially hated the Jews, and that this was well known at the time, look no further than the 1940 film melodrama The Man I Married. In it an American woman sees Nazi soldiers, with help from some civilians, grossly humiliating a group of Czechs. She at first assumes they are Jews. A scene near the end makes it clear just how repulsive the very thought of Jewishness is to a true Nazi when her German husband, who is about to divorce her, threatens to keep their child in Germany. He then finds out that his mother was a Jew, much to the horror of his Nazi girlfriend.
Let us also not forget the anti-Jewish attitude the Nazis took in their international affairs. Foreign authors, for example, had to attest to their Aryan heritage before their books could be published in Germany. Tolkien wrote a rather nasty letter to the prospective German publisher of The Hobbit, in which he stated he was not Indo-Iranian, and therefore not truly Aryan, but "if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." (Unfortunately, no clear evidence exists that the letter was actually sent.)

So I too am amazed that there are people who apparently truly believe it didn't happen. As others have said here, I do think it's proper that historians debate the numbers, details, etc. - so long as that doesn't devolve into a more subtle form of anti-Semitism. For example, I know of someone who published a small newspaper for the Polish-American community, and he often editorialized about how the accepted numbers overemphasized the Jews who were killed and essentially ignored the non-Jewish Poles - but these editorials were often framed as exposing a Jewish plot, or said things like "they're at it again." It's a small step from that to denying that the Jews were the primary target, and another small step to outright denial.
 
ChasFink said:
Auschwitz-Birkenau is still there. You can visit - I have. And I've met relatives who still have the arm tattoos.
People leave flowers and notes on specific inmate photos among the many that line the hallways of the barracks at Auschwitz. That's a pretty ridiculous level of detail for a hoax.

And if you need proof that the Nazis especially hated the Jews, and that this was well known at the time, look no further than the 1940 film melodrama The Man I Married. In it an American woman sees Nazi soldiers, with help from some civilians, grossly humiliating a group of Czechs. She at first assumes they are Jews. A scene near the end makes it clear just how repulsive the very thought of Jewishness is to a true Nazi when her German husband, who is about to divorce her, threatens to keep their child in Germany. He then finds out that his mother was a Jew, much to the horror of his Nazi girlfriend.
Let us also not forget the anti-Jewish attitude the Nazis took in their international affairs. Foreign authors, for example, had to attest to their Aryan heritage before their books could be published in Germany. Tolkien wrote a rather nasty letter to the prospective German publisher of The Hobbit, in which he stated he was not Indo-Iranian, and therefore not truly Aryan, but "if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." (Unfortunately, no clear evidence exists that the letter was actually sent.)

So I too am amazed that there are people who apparently truly believe it didn't happen. As others have said here, I do think it's proper that historians debate the numbers, details, etc. - so long as that doesn't devolve into a more subtle form of anti-Semitism. For example, I know of someone who published a small newspaper for the Polish-American community, and he often editorialized about how the accepted numbers overemphasized the Jews who were killed and essentially ignored the non-Jewish Poles - but these editorials were often framed as exposing a Jewish plot, or said things like "they're at it again." It's a small step from that to denying that the Jews were the primary target, and another small step to outright denial.
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Yes I remember being out somewhere in East London with my Jewish ex and one of his neighbours showed us the tattoo on his arm. He'd have been a young kid of course, when in the camps, and this was a good 20 years back, but I never forgot it.

My grandfather saw Belsen with his own eyes but never, ever spoke about it. Not to anyone. Not my dad who was an only child and also had been a soldier in WW2 - or to my grandma. My dad saw that World At War doc in the 1960s and I remember him saying it was the first time he'd seen on film, what his father had experienced in person. My grandfather was a tough man (sergeant who went through both world wars) and talked about all kinds of wartime experiences from both the trenches and WW2 - but never would speak a word about Belsen.
 
ChasFink said:
Auschwitz-Birkenau is still there. You can visit - I have. And I've met relatives who still have the arm tattoos.
People leave flowers and notes on specific inmate photos among the many that line the hallways of the barracks at Auschwitz. That's a pretty ridiculous level of detail for a hoax.

And if you need proof that the Nazis especially hated the Jews, and that this was well known at the time, look no further than the 1940 film melodrama The Man I Married. In it an American woman sees Nazi soldiers, with help from some civilians, grossly humiliating a group of Czechs. She at first assumes they are Jews. A scene near the end makes it clear just how repulsive the very thought of Jewishness is to a true Nazi when her German husband, who is about to divorce her, threatens to keep their child in Germany. He then finds out that his mother was a Jew, much to the horror of his Nazi girlfriend.
Let us also not forget the anti-Jewish attitude the Nazis took in their international affairs. Foreign authors, for example, had to attest to their Aryan heritage before their books could be published in Germany. Tolkien wrote a rather nasty letter to the prospective German publisher of The Hobbit, in which he stated he was not Indo-Iranian, and therefore not truly Aryan, but "if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." (Unfortunately, no clear evidence exists that the letter was actually sent.)

So I too am amazed that there are people who apparently truly believe it didn't happen. As others have said here, I do think it's proper that historians debate the numbers, details, etc. - so long as that doesn't devolve into a more subtle form of anti-Semitism. For example, I know of someone who published a small newspaper for the Polish-American community, and he often editorialized about how the accepted numbers overemphasized the Jews who were killed and essentially ignored the non-Jewish Poles - but these editorials were often framed as exposing a Jewish plot, or said things like "they're at it again." It's a small step from that to denying that the Jews were the primary target, and another small step to outright denial.
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Yes I think it's the same with various "denial" delusions. People get the self-assurance and self-importance that they don't feel from their lives by "knowing" that something factual is not true. I have had conversations with a few people who deny the WTC events. When I point out that I was in fact in the city that day so had direct secondary knowledge and also have multiple friends who physically observed the events the deniers just fade away. My aunt in the WAC's was in Germany right after there was a cease-fire and women were allowed into combat areas and she was also a witness, several of her friends were involved in the liberation of the camps.
 
Lb8535 said:
I have had conversations with a few people who deny the WTC events.
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Wow. False flag theories are one thing - even if they're not very believable - but to deny it happened is bizarre. I know someone who was in one of the buildings and got out just in time. I smelled the burning from home, 25 miles away, three days later. I visited the wreckage, where I had previously seen skyscrapers, three weeks after it happened.
 
He is former military (I'm not sure if that is a significant factor or not). He is also prone to believe many types of conspiracies.
 
ChasFink said:
Wow. False flag theories are one thing - even if they're not very believable - but to deny it happened is bizarre. I know someone who was in one of the buildings and got out just in time. I smelled the burning from home, 25 miles away, three days later. I visited the wreckage, where I had previously seen skyscrapers, three weeks after it happened.
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A few have shown up in the WTC thread on the board. They post asking about whether a favorite conspiracy theory is believable and wanting to discuss it.
 
gordonrutter said:
Holocaust denier David Irving has died aged 85.
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I went to a sit down student protest at uni - he was booked to speak at our union and we barred his way in. We were being photographed by... who knows but men with creases pressed in their jeans and very clean shoes, trying to pass as fellow students. Very interesting experience. As I said upthread, my grandad was amongst the soldiers who walked into Belsen. Wasn't going to let a holocaust denier speak. My grandad (who was not only a sargeant but also excelled at bare knuckle fighting) would have dealt with him in a more straightforward way.
 
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The pandemic seems to have spiked an increase in conspiracy theories - holocaust and WTC deniers, etc. I guess that must happen in traumatic times. Some people simply can't handle realities, so construct alternate fantasies to make the world feel "safe" again..? And also, as Lb8535 said above: people feel more self important if they feel they know some secret of the universe or that they somehow understand things other people don't.
 
Spookdaddy said:
No he hasn't. Never happened. David Irving was actually a bus driver from Staines - it's logistically impossible that he could have ever been a dead historian, and and all the photographs have been faked.
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I've been flirting with the idea that he could be dead, but only because the paperwork I've seen implies it. That said, I'd only admit it outright in front of the kind of like-minded audience that ordinarily meets behind closed doors.

In all seriousness, he really was a highly skilled researcher who produced very readable prose, but something went drastically wrong. If his unsalvageably tarnished reputation means none of his work is read or cited by mainstream historians, it's a genuine loss to the subject.

Mad bastard.
 
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